wood thrush song
A nano-puddle in a fallen oak leaf. A wood thrush was singing while I crouched to get the shot. I was working with a much broader crop when the limitations of the free Snapseed app—most of the best font options, including this one, don’t permit line breaks—led me to experiment with bleed-through of contrasting colors at ~50% opacity to emphasize the semantic break.
more of a comment
than a question
We have barred owls who often call at sunset (and at other random times throughout the day and night) so I started out thinking about that who and went from there. The result being itself a bit of a head-scratcher is, to my way of thinking, permissibly self-reflexive.
As it happens, while I was composing this, sitting on a bench near what we call the Far Field and thinking about barred owls, one of them let out a loud who from a hundred yards away. If I thought more readers would be familiar with the birders’ mnemonic for its full call, I might have gone with my penultimate draft:
spring sunset
who cooks
for you all
the angel of history’s
prosthetic wings
When there’s too much to fit into a haiku — the giant pylons, each tree’s signature of knots, the scream of a red-tailed hawk circling low overhead — my instinct is to reach for some unifying symbol. The Biden administration’s apparent decision to double down on our forever wars has been preying on my mind.
Made in Snapseed with a font that’s only supposed to be used for single lines of text, but since it looks so handwritten, it’s not imperative to get each line exactly the same height, so saving one line at a time more or less works.
that emphatic
WHO-all
we forget after a while that they aren’t the horizon, that their trees don’t go on forever, that the sky is wider than we can know.
even the full moon isn’t
where I left it
You don’t actually have to be able to see at all!
that the poems began to come without being called.
I must never forget how exhilarating it felt to find myself briefly at the head of a mob.
belongs only to those with no need for veins, like a wanderlust that starts where the highway ends.
